About Me

Who I Am

I'm Mark Prince, a web developer based out of Baltimore County Maryland. I started my path down web development in 2016 when I got frustrated with a website I was using at my internship. I asked my boss if I could take a stab at making the website a little more user friendly, and he said yes. Over that Summer, I learned the basics of HTML and CSS from scratch and successfully completed a mobile friendly redesign for the company website. Turns out, that was going to become my career.

Before this stint with Web Development, I was majoring in Middle School Education. My plan was to teach both Language Arts and Social Studies. But throughout the 2016 fall semester, my experiences with Web Development kept nagging at me. Nothing I was doing interested me quite as much as that random site redesign I did over the summer.

So, in December of 2016, I switched into the Information Technology program at Towson University and decided to pursue a career in Web Development.

Over the past couple years, I have done work on improving Ecommerce websites and implementing mobile first designs. You can see more of this on my projects page. But really, I am interested in all parts of web design and development. If you are interested in working with me, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn.

Why Neocities?

Some people have wondered why I am hosting my personal site on Neocities. It is a little goofy, isn't it?

I am using Neocities because I like the platform. It has a decent text editor, it is free to use, and you also get to discover a bunch of strange websites, kind of like how you would have with GeoCities in the early years of the internet.

Sure, I could build my personal site using something like Wix or Squarespace, maybe whip up a website using a CMS like Wordpress or get some "Cred" with a flat file CMS like Grav. These are all good options that would make good looking websites, and I will probably use these platforms in the future. But I know how to code, and I don't need the bloat of a CMS for this particular project, and I don't mind having Neocities in my URL if it is free. So for this specific site, I decided to use the fun platform.

I promise I won't force it onto your projects.

Additional Interests

Outside of Web Development, I love the social sciences. Just because I decided to go into web development as my career does not mean I am not willing to help out on writing projects when I can. If you have content that needs to be written for your website, I am happy to help.

I'm also an avid musician. I have been playing drums for over 15 years and currently play in a few cover bands in the area (UPDATE: Not during the Covid-19 pandemic, that would be irresponsible). But I promise I won't drum on my desk or during zoom meetings. I agree that there is nothing more annoying than mindless tapping on a desk, and us drummers are a huge part of the problem.